Voice chat is now standard fare in video gaming communities. Gone are the days when you had to share a couch to socialize while playing. Why bother when you can stay at home and chat over the internet all the same? The technology exists!

But with so many options available, you may be confused as to which one is right for you and your circle of friends. We’ll show you the five best voice chat solutions for gaming and each of their pros and cons.

Discord is a free app that runs on Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, iOS, and as a web app (not as feature-rich as the desktop versions as far as voice configuration). If you’ve ever used Slack or IRC, then you’ll feel right at home on Discord. In addition to voice chat, Discord supports text chat and video chat (for up to 10 people).

The Pros of Discord

Anyone can create a “Discord server” for free. Users can join as many servers as they want, and each server is essentially its own independent community. Servers can have text channels and voice channels, and the server owner can tweak pretty much everything about it. Discord hosts the servers itself.

The Cons of Discord

Since all servers are hosted through Discord, an outage means all Discord servers go down and you can’t do anything about it except wait.

Furthermore, Discord servers are only hosted in the following locations: U.S. East, U.S. Central, U.S. West, U.S. South, Europe West, Europe Central, Russia, Brazil, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Australia. If you’re outside those regions, then latency may cause intolerable delays in voice chat.

Discord may actually be a bit overkill if you only want voice chat. It’s best to use if you’re already participating in a few other Discord servers, in which case you’ll already be running the Discord app and have nothing to lose.

Mumble is a free and open-source app that runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux. On mobile, you can use a third-party app: Plumble for Android and Mumblefy for iOS. It’s mainly used for voice chat, though it also supports primitive text chat.

The Pros of Mumble

Mumble specializes in low-latency communicationWhat Is A Ping, And Is Zero Ping Possible?What Is A Ping, And Is Zero Ping Possible?Ping is a command used to measure the latency between two devices on a network. When your internet feels fast, you're experiencing a low ping. But why does your ping change, and how can you...Read More, which makes it great for high-octane games with lots of fast action, especially ones that involve teamplay. It can also do positional audio based where you are in the game world, but this is only supported on some games (such as most Source Engine games and Guild Wars 2).

Everything is in your control. If you want to host a server, you just download the server version of Mumble and run it on your computer. Then everyone else downloads the client version of Mumble to connect to your IP address. You can create channels to keep everything organized.

If you want 24/7 uptime without leaving your computer on all the time, you can buy Mumble server hosting. Expect to pay about $2.50 per month per five slots, although the price-per-slot drops drastically as slots increase. And you can get hefty discounts by paying for multiple months at once instead of going monthly.

TeamSpeak is a free app that runs on Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, and iOS (the mobile apps are client apps only). TeamSpeak is very similar to Mumble in design and operation, but offers some unique features while also falling short in certain aspects.

The Pros of TeamSpeak

TeamSpeak has an easy-to-use interface with high-quality audio, though with slightly more latency than Mumble. However, the difference is negligible in most cases.

TeamSpeak also has a flexible and powerful permissions system that allows different users to have control over different areas of the server based on their “power level.” The permissions also divide into groups, so you can grant control over a channel to one user and grant control over the server to another. This makes community management much easier.

Like Mumble, you can self-host TeamSpeak or you can pay for hosting.

The Cons of TeamSpeak

You can only connect to one TeamSpeak server at a time.

Self-hosted TeamSpeak servers have a maximum capacity of 32 simultaneous users. If you request and acquire a non-commercial non-profit license, you can raise that limit to 512. Otherwise, you’ll need to pay an annual fee based on maximum capacity. Not a big deal for private groups of friends, but a possible deal-breaker for public communities.

The options above are the Big Three, and almost every gamer develops a preference for one of them. If you don’t like any of them for whatever reason, there are two other voice chat solutions you can use. But be warned: they have some glaring flaws.

Hangouts lets you make free voice calls to other Hangouts users, plus video conferences with up to 10 total participants. It’s fine for lounging around with fellow gaming friends, but not the best for actual gaming because the quality isn’t optimized for it, you don’t have options for push-to-talk, and there’s no persistence between calls.

I have not used the first two but I do use TeamSpeak and can say that the con you listed is just not true. You just need to bookmark your servers the right click on them and you get an option to open in a new tab. You can open several sessions that way.

Discord is fantastic, and it has a good future, particularly with the many investments it has received. Discord generally is a little exaggerated in case you handiest need a voice chat. Discord may really be a bit overkill if you just want voice chat.
The app has a welcoming look with cute graphics, and the concept that it is possible to grow your very own digital garden as you learn will pull in the playful learners among you. The app includes audio-visual learning lesson, where you find an image with each word or phrase and you'll hear them spoken by natives. The app isn't difficult to download, easy to work out, enjoyable to take a look at, and even more enjoyable to use. This app may also be used if you're already really good in that language and you simply need to repeat stuff or wish to chat to natives or if you will need somebody to review that which you have written

Discord is fantastic? My brother and I downloaded it to get away from Skype and it won't even work. It lights up the green bar when I talk, so it hears me, but nothing goes through to my brother on the call. I can hear him. I tried all the reset settings, changing input/output devices, manual sensitivity, etc etc. Rebooted the PC. Nothing made Discord work. So, no, it does not seem very fantastic.

Bless you! I use a phone that is locked with a particular provider, and they use their own proprietary software. I have Android 4.4.2, and Google's installed apps were eating away at the 4 GB onboard storage. Now I'm only using 3.4 GB, which is some nice headroom. Thank you for showing me how to essentially make them disappear!

If all you need is one to one voice chat on computers running Linux Mac or Windows, Tox is a good solution. Because it is peer to peer, you get the ABSOLUTE BEST quality possible. It's also open-source and runs on a decentralized network, so no outages EVER. I love using it.